A letter from a reader

At 63, I was checking the forecast four times a day to decide whether I was allowed out

The only things I ever write for other people are the recipe cards I tuck in with a casserole when somebody at church is laid up, and those rarely get past the oven temperature. I am not a writer. And I have never once thought it was my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on her feet.

But three different women asked me about my boots down by the river on Sunday, in the pouring rain, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

It started last winter, though I did not notice it starting. Every morning I write the weather in the little square on the kitchen calendar, one word, and underneath it where I went that day. The squares began to say rain, rain, drizzle, rain, and underneath them I stopped writing anything at all. The Tuesday farmers market. The long walk by the river. Lunch at Sue's. Somewhere in there, the weather had started making my decisions for me.

It was my sister Sue who put her finger on it. She had come for the day in October, and she watched me stand at the kitchen window with my phone for the third time before eleven o'clock.

Peggy, you have looked at that forecast four times since breakfast. It is not going to change its mind.

She was right, and it stung. I had become a woman who waits in the car. Frank would take our daughter's labrador around the park while I sat there with the heater running. I told myself it was sensible. It was not sensible. It was wet feet, and I had let wet feet make me smaller.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to stop going out. It happens one gray morning at a time, until your sister catches you checking your phone for permission.

How it happens

I was never a fair-weather sort. As a girl I walked to school in every kind of weather and thought nothing of it, and I once stood through an entire church picnic in a thunderstorm because I had promised to run the cake walk.

What changed was not me. It was the choice I was being offered.

Go and look at what there is for a wet day at our age. On one side, rubber rain boots. Heavy, cold, a battle to get on, and you cannot very well walk into a café or the pharmacy in them. On the other side, the pretty little ankle boots, which look nice in the store and let the rain in at the first puddle.

So you do what I did. You wear the nice ones on dry days, you keep the rubber boots for the yard, and on every day in between you simply stay at home. Nobody notices. That is the trouble.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I thought the problem was the rain. I thought I had gotten older and softer and could not face it anymore, and that was simply how it was going to be now.

It turns out that was never the rain.

It was my feet. Cold feet and damp socks will ruin a morning faster than any weather, and I had spent years choosing between boots that kept me dry and boots I did not mind being seen in. Nobody had ever handed me a pair that did both.

Dry enough for the river trail, nice enough for the café afterwards, and easy enough to get on that I would not think twice. It took me until 63 to realize that was all I had been missing.

The boots are called the Roslyn

They are from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now.

They are called the Roslyn. A soft padded ankle boot in a deep navy blue, the color of a good winter coat, with a zip straight down the front, a little gathered band at the ankle and a warm plush lining inside. They do them in black, brown, light brown and a cheerful red as well, which I will come back to.

They are waterproof, which I did not quite believe until I had stood in the puddle at the end of our driveway on purpose to find out. The sole is non-slip and grips properly, on a wet river trail and on the church steps alike. The lining is soft and cushioned, so my feet were still warm and comfortable after two hours out. And the zip goes all the way down the front, so they are on and off in a moment, with no sitting on the back steps wrestling with anything.

That is really all there is to them. They are not complicated. They are just boots that somebody thought about.

What happened down by the river

I wore them for the first time on our Sunday walk along the river trail, in the kind of rain I would have watched from the window a month before.

Frank and I walked the long stretch with our daughter's labrador, all the way down to the dam. A squall was blowing through, and three women were sheltering under the pavilion by the canoe rental while it did. All three of them asked me about my boots. One of them was Verna, who has run that canoe rental for fifteen years and has, to my knowledge, never passed comment on anything but the river level.

She looked down at my feet, looked at the sky, and said I looked like I had meant to come out in this. From Verna, that is a speech.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I stopped thinking about my feet altogether. I walked through the puddles instead of around them. We went on to the little café by the bridge and I sat by the window in them and nobody would have guessed where I had been.

The next morning I put them straight back on to take the labrador across the park, and I did not look at the forecast once. That is the rarest sort of boot. The one that takes you through the mud and into the café, and feels right in both.

Three things I have learned since

One. The zip is the whole point. It runs right down the front, so you can open the boot wide, step in and zip up without bending double or hopping around the hallway. I had not realized how much I dreaded putting boots on until I stopped dreading it.

Two. Tuck your pants in. They are the right height to take slim pants tucked inside, which keeps the hems out of the puddles and looks tidy with it. Over jeans works just as well on a dry day.

Three. Order your usual size. They come from a US 4.5 up to a US 11. I am an 8 and the 8 was right, with room for a thicker sock on the really cold mornings.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Roslyn is $47.95. It was $96.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a pair of winter boots that let the water in by November.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on right now while the first of the fall stock comes in.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it more. One woman from Vernon had written, “Walked the dog through a real downpour and came home with dry socks. First winter in years I have not dreaded.”

Then I ordered the red pair as well, for the days when I feel brave.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting at my kitchen table with a pot of coffee and the rain coming down sideways outside, this is what I would say.

If you have started checking the forecast before you let yourself go out, and you have quietly said no to more mornings than you would like to admit, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a pair of boots will change your life. They will not. But there is something in walking out into a wet morning because you want to that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on right now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because the 8 in red was gone by the time I went back and I had to wait for it. And the first of the fall stock is already going, and once this stock is gone, it is gone, so I would not leave it until the weather turns.

The calendar says rain again this morning. Underneath it I have written: river, with Frank.

Peggy